Truly, Madly, Deeply (mostly madly)

JIM LOVES LAUREN, MAUREEN LOVES JULIETTE, SHERMAN LOVES AMY, AND PAULA

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LAUREN HUTTON'5 ABC'S

' hen you hear that banal old line "Take my hand, I'm a stranger in paradise," it occurs to you that such emotions are rarely accessible. Romantic gullibility is, however, characteristic of songwriters and poets, and I happen to be, among other things, one of the latter. The onset of a crush or infatuation is a nonmilitary surge, a rather blowsy tsunami in the brainpan so that the soul develops twinkle toes, the heart enlarges to the size of the Pacific Rim. If you're married, it is far safer if the object of desire is a photo in a magazine, or on the silver screen, rather than within the somewhat rigid confines of your actual life.

You wonder how pheromones can emerge from the pages of a magazine and infect the mind of the viewer? It's not just me who has experienced this affliction. Early in my

mediocre screenwriting career I dined several times with Orson Welles in Patrick Terrail's Ma Maison in Hollywood. Over the usual caviar, a whole Norwegian poached salmon, a leg of lamb and several French Premiers Grand Crus, I asked him if the Rita Hayworth stories were true. Of course. He told me he was in Brazil and had seen the fabulous photo of Rita on the cover of Life magazine, jumped the next plane to Los Angeles and soon married her. How heroic, though I was cynical enough to question whether it was really "the next plane." Didn't he have business in Rio to tidy up? In any event, the marriage was a "disaster." Orson also warned me never to fall in love with a hatcheck girl, valuable advice, though I never met one.

I've had a number of such experiences of varying intensity.

Lucky for me I'm half Swede and Swedes are slow studies, brooders. They're more likely to walk in a rainy forest for a month and then miss the next plane because they tried to expunge their perilous emotions with herring and aquavit.

After boyish infatuations with Deanna Durbin and Jeanne Crain (State Fair), Deborah Kerr (tied to the stake in a neg­ligee in Quo V'adis), Ava Gardner (The Barefoot Contessa), Cyd Charisse (kicking sky-high in Deep in My Heart), I hit a vac­uum for a while before Lee Remick twirling her baton in A Face in the Crowd hit me hard below the belt.

There was a hiatus for a time in my wanton but abstract affections because of a very happy marriage sexually and the general busyness of my life. I had spent two mostly miserable years as a poet, a writer of reviews for The New York Times Book Review, an administrator of an English department at Stony Brook University on Long Island. I simply didn't have time to let the devil into my life until we moved to northern Michigan on the grace of two grants and I had my first extended leisure since I began working at the age of 12. We lived in an idyllic

stone farmhouse for 75 bucks a month on a hill overlooking Lake Michigan. I was finding it hard to write in a state of total freedom, and one idle summer morning, probably with a hangover, I picked up my wife's Vogue and stared long and hard at a Richard Avedon display of a young model named Lauren Hutton. It was shot in the Bahamas, and in one photo I seem to remember Lauren was on her tummy reading Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading, one of my favorite books at the time. For some strange reason asses can be more memorable than books and to be frank her butt was extremely bare. There was the "involuntary shudder" in my body that we read about in novels but never actually get to feel. It was akin to getting suckered into peeing on an electric fence in my farmboy childhood. Since I was a literary type, I doubt­less thought of Lucrezia Borgia or the nudes of Botticelli or Modigliani to try to raise lust, the brain's hangnail, to higher ground. Far later in life I learned that male chimps will give up lunch to look at photos of female chimp butts, but at the time I tended to want desire to be somehow connected to the English Romantic movement. I'm sure my unruly but silky hair was sweating as I turned and re-turned the page. This was clearly the finest flower of womankind, as they say.

In my heroic posturing as a young American poet of note, I naturally wrote her a letter, and she wrote back saying, "You sure can turn a girl's head with that type­writer." I wrote again but received no answer. A certain slippage entered my fantasy, which, after all, was mostly

literary. Would 1 have been so awestruck had she been reading Peyton Place rather than Ezra Pound? Also, hav­ing lost my left eye to an angry girl wielding a broken bottle at the age of seven, I had lost any impulse to push myself on a woman. Pheromones again. They either like you or they don't. Stalkers have always been a mystery to me. Why pursue a woman unless she gives you some sort of welcome sign? And my somewhat unstable mind was distressed one morning remembering the night's dream wherein Lauren lived in a house on a small causeway out in a harbor somewhere. I was anyway recovering from a severe back injury and writing a novel, having deter­mined that the few hundred bucks in royalties delivered by my books of poems wouldn't support my family.

Our fantasy neurons can burn out, but they can also enliven themselves, sort of like the attempt to bring back the two-dollar bill, or the idea that chapters ol life don't close but smear and blur themselves into the next. About half a dozen years after the "Pure Poet in Northern Michigan"

chapter, I was in Key West tarpon fishing and made friends with Phil Clark, about whom jimmy Buffett wrote his song "A Pirate Looks at 40." These tarpon trips lacked wisdom, as drugs, booze and other nonsense were integrally woven into our sporting life. Clark was a wonderfully raffitie character involved in commercial fishing and smuggling, not a unique combination of vocations in the Keys in those days. Clark told me that when he lived in New York City he had roomed with Lauren Hutton, though they weren't romantically con­nected. That didn't quell my hot jealousy as I imagined them passing each other in and out of the shower. I think at the time Lauren worked briefly at the Playboy Club.

Half a dozen years later I was in Hollywood as an accidentally successful screenwriter, though it was some years before my mediocrity at this difficult form would be revealed. While in Hollywood, when not taking meetings I'd stay with Jack Nicholson. When I brought up Lauren Hutton he said that she was utterly lovely but tough and that he had once sent her roses but she had sent them back. He also warned me that while actors are usually three people, actresses are always at least five.

My memories of my Hollywood years are, not surpris­ingly, blurred, as the 1980s were not a time of rehab. I somehow managed to get an informal date with Lauren at an intensely private club. On the Rox, which was up above the Roxy Theatre and where one would run into a sparse crowd of people like fco)itinuetl on page ISO)

MADLY

(continued from page 154)

Jagger and Belushi or find James Taylor jamming. I sat there at the bar with my fat heart going pitty-pat. In came Lau­ren, splendid in cowboy boots, Levi's, an open white satin blouse, a tweed coat and uncapped teeth. I'm normally volu­ble, but I recall stuttering a bit. We had a drink and talked about Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Faulkner for an hour, and then she left.

That was that for another half dozen years until in New York City a magazine was giving a party at '21' for George Plimpton and me, who were columnists for it. I recall that no one recognized me when I entered, because I was wearing a camel-hair coat and a three-piece suit. Lauren had been an old friend of George Plimpton's ever since Paper Lion, and when she arrived we talked about my cooking dinner at her place, but noth­ing came of it. I excel at naps, pouring drinks, lighting my cigarettes, writing too many novels and some say cooking.

The last I heard of Lauren was at the Tosca Cafe, a bar I like in San Francisco. The owner, Jeannette Etheredge, is an old friend of Lauren's and said there had been a severe motorcycle accident and Lauren was badly injured. I sent along my sympathies and in my melancholy I wondered why people ride around on these skinless rockets, but then I also question the efficacy of internal combus­tion, photography, movies, mirrors. Our affections are up for grabs in our nontra-ditional society, but then this isn't new. A couple of years ago I visited Dante's house in Florence and questioned again how he could spend his entire life on a work dedicated to Beatrice, an eight-year-old girl who he met when he was nine, and was never to sleep with. I can sit in my studio and look at a blank wall and see all the heroines of my novels march past, carefully ignoring their ori­gins, mindful that James M. Cain said, "I write for the wish that comes true, for some reason a terrifying concept." It is a comfort to know that women also suffer this fantasy affliction. Nearly 50 years ago during a bridge game with another couple in our squalid married-housing apartment our friend stood up and shrieked at her diminutive husband, "You shrimp, you miserable little turd, you're nothing compared to my true love, Marlon Brando."

LA BINOCHE BY MAUREEN GIBBON

You know the scene. It's from Damage, when she's in bed with Jeremy Irons. He's facing her, moving into her, and her 0 cheekbone rubs against his shoulder.

With each plunge, she rocks upward. Because she's pressed tight against his body, the skin of her cheek moves up a little too.

It's that little movement of her skin, that little bit of flesh over bone, that does it for me. It's such an unusual detail that it makes me think of the other parts of her that are moving, of the more inti­mate friction taking place.

And when she looks at the camera in that scene, I feel closer to her than I've ever felt to anyone in a film. I feel as if I'm the one up against her, making the skin over her cheekbone move.

Did I say she keeps her necklace on through the whole thing? A thick-linked serpentine chain that rides her collar­bones. The necklace makes her naked­ness seem ornate, timeless and just a bit raunchy- Wearing that necklace also makes her echo that other famous French nude, Manet's Olympia, who wears a black ribbon choker.

Okay, so maybe the necklace does it for me too.

I do know that after I saw that movie, I went out and bought some gold beads that I could keep on in bed—me and probably hundreds of other women. I wanted to be like her, I wanted to be with her, I wanted to be her.

But my crush on La Binoche, as the French press calls her, started years before. It began back when we were both in our 20s, when she climbed and straddled Daniel Day-Lewis in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. She played an innocent in that movie, her want as plain as her schoolgirl underwear. It was almost hard to watch how much she revealed, how vulnerable she made her­self. She was so real she made little piggy grunts when she came with Day-Lewis. And what about the scene where she and Lena Olin take photos of each other? She is shy at first, and then she isn't. She gets greedy, excited. And so did I.

She might have been a raw Czech girl in that movie, but by the time she made Blue, in 1993, she was a Parisian woman in a black miniskirt, black tights, black heels. Even in portraying grief and con­fusion, she commands—and men obey.

(Which leads me to why I don't care for Chocolat. What was director Lasse Hall-strom thinking when he made Johnny Depp the seducer in that movie? If she had been the aggressor, ordering rover Johnny to strip, the way she did with her lover in Blue, it might have added some salt to that sweet confection.)

I lere's why I crave her:

Because she's smart and shows her

thoughts on the screen. No one can think or feel the way she does on camera.

Because she has that pelt of dark hair that you know smells of her. Some­times it's boyish and almost badly cut, and sometimes it's long with severe bangs. It's as expressive as she is. Once I saw a photo of her as a blonde, and it alarmed me. Not that I have anything against blondes, but with the exception of Deneuve I want my French actresses to be dark-haired. I just do. Or maybe I just want her to be dark-haired. 1 don't care about the rest.

Because. Of. That. Mole. It's just beneath her jaw, on the left side of her very white neck, beneath her very dark hair. I bet it makes directors change angles of scenes so it can somehow be featured. It's an imperfection. It's kissable. What can I say? It drives me to distraction.

I think that's what Daniel Auteuil's character feels when he played her hus­band in The Widow ofSaint-Pierre. High-necked dresses and bonnet strings hide the beauty mark for most of the movie, but you know it's there even when a cos­tume or camera angle won't allow you to see it. In the one bedroom scene in the movie, Auteuil touches her eyelids and lips and cites them as reasons for his strength. He also kisses her neck, right about where that tiny jewel lies. And this, he says. He means the captivat­ing, bewitching little mole—or at least that's what I like to think.

While Auteuil's character may pub­licly be Monsieur Le Capitaine, a French officer, because of her, his primary role in life is lover. He is an admirer of beauty marks, a sniffer of lace underthings, a devotee of her.

I understand fully.

If you do any amount of Googling and surfing, you'll find plenty of com­ments about her, like "Her face tells a story," "Radiant" and "Most beautiful actress of our time." But I also found the statement "I'd crawl over broken glass for Juliette."

Moi aussi, buddy. Me too.

JAVE ME

BY SHERMAN ALEXIE

I fall in love with lesbians. Not porn les­bians. Everyday lesbians. The ones who don't want men to fall in love with them. Oh, they don't mind the attention, even the flirtation, but the physical boundaries are firmly in place. But wait, I fall for the other kind, too. The lesbians who want men to fall in love with them so they can ground and pound the vain masculine heart. And I once fell in love with a shy and tentative one.

I lost my virginity to a lesbian. Didn't know she was one until she started weep­ing in the back of my car. My mother's car. A mini station wagon. A high school love machine.

Anyway, she wept.

If I'd been a prodigal film buff, I might

have thought of Roger Vadim's infamous quote that he finds nothing sexier than a naked woman weeping.

But I was just an arrogant and self-impressed postcoital boy (I figure Vadim never stopped being an arrogant and sell-impressed postcoital boy).

1 thought maybe I'd hurt my first lover with my enormous penis. I thought maybe I'd opened up physical, emotional and spiritual parts of her that she never knew existed. I thought I'd been so good thai I'd created a new School of Art.

"Why are you crying?" I asked.

"Because I'm a lesbian," she said.

Holy, holy, holy.

Damaged soldiers duck when cars backfire; I duck whenever I see a woman

wno looks exactly like James Dean.

Cut to summer 1994, Seattle, sum­mer concerts on the pier.

Emily Saliers and Amy Ray, the Indigo Girls, are starring in a revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's secular craptacular, Jesus Christ Superstar.

My wife and I go because we love the Indigo Girls (and frankly, because we also love Andrew Lloyd Webber's craptaculars). I can sing along to 50 or GO of the Indigo Girls' songs (and here, I feel inse­cure enough to tell you that I can also sing along to 200 AC/DC, Melallica and Black Sabbath songs and have a nice spin move on the basketball court). So any­way, my wife and I arrive on the pier,

sit in row 30 or 40, near (he aisle, and, let me tell you, the lesbian weather is torrential. The crowd is maybe 90 per­cent female, and at least half of them are lesbians. More like two thirds of them. Maybe it's 90 percent of them. And please don't accuse me of sexual­ity profiling those women. They were overtly and obviously lesbians. Some of them wore T-shirts that read, yes, i am \ i.F.siiiAN. It was a United Nations of lesbians, Baskin-Robbins of lesbians and color wheel of lesbians.

"You're in heaven, aren't you?" my wife asks.

She knows I fetish for lesbians, feel and. well, lesbian feet. My wife

is straight, but I wouldn't be terribly shocked if she tame roaring out of the closet one day.

"I'm not in heaven," I say. "1 am liv­ing here and now on this wonderful planet called Karth."

We're late in arriving, so the show starts immediately. Music swells. The lights go down (making the orange falling sun explode its orangeness all over the dark waters of Klliot Bay. Who knew orange is the sexiest color on the planet?) and then she appears.

And by she, I mean SHE, The Lord Jesus Christ.

Dressed in a simple brown coat and pants, carpenter wear, Amy Ray comes walking from the back of the pier, sing-

ing the overture, and walks down the aisle near us.

And the crowd goes mad. Fucking crazy. Call me a sexist. Call me cal­low. Call me a pornographic dreamer. But I am quite sure that hundreds of women had spontaneous orgasms when Amy Ray/Jesus materialized in our presence.

Amy Ray is not a typically beautiful woman. Oh, she has great eyes and smile. She's tall and rather curvy. And she's smarter than hell and sings gorgeously and loves the New York Times Sunday cross­word. So, in short, she would be a major league catch for any woman or man. But she's nobody's cover girl. Not really.

Of course, all of those shallow con­siderations vanish in the presence of the sacred.

As Amy walks down the aisle, sing­ing, a dozen or more women touch her. They touch her hair and arms and legs. They touch her belly and back. And Amy touches them. It's quite erotic.

But then I realize it's something else, too.

These women, these lesbians, have spent their lives being excluded, ridi­culed, misunderstood, stereotyped and despised, often by members of their own families, and especially by the church.

Which church? Pretty much all of them.

And now, here is the savior, the mes-siah, the alpha and omega, the man at

the foundation of Christianity and the United States, and this man is no longer a man. Jesus is a lesbian.

And so it all felt deeply spiritual, sexual and blas­phemous.

Can blasphemy be sexy? Damn right, it can be, especially when one believes that the churches, and all of their preachers and congregates, are absolutely wrong about gays.

"Jesus," my wife says as Amy parts the crowd and walks onstage. "1 never knew she was so beautiful."

I want to tell my wife that I always knew, but of course, I didn't. Somebody familiar to us had become somebody exotic. The secular and sacred are blended in one person. And

isn't that the hottest thing imaginable?

FRANCHOT TONE AT THE PARAMOUNT

BY PAULA FOX

Franchot Tone died in September 1968. In 1935, when I was 12, I saw the actor in the earliest version of the film Mutiny on the Bounty. I sat in a dark movie house, my knees pressed up against the unoccu­pied seat in front of me. Tone played one of the officers who mutiny against the cruel Captain Bligh (Charles Laughton), whom they put overboard into a small lifeboat and abandon to the open sea.

The crew and officers return to Tahiti. It is an exuberant story. The great ship moves through the waves, the masts

creak, the sails billow as crew members shout across the decks to one another amid ocean spray. Then they are in Tahiti, and Franchot Tone, wearing a sarong, a wreath of large white-petaled blossoms hanging from his neck, stands close to a beautiful young Tahitian woman. Another fleshy fellow in the cast is the star of the movie, Clark Gable, a large man whose acting I found severely limited. I paid him no attention.

My knees slipped down from the seat-back to the floor. I leaned forward, enrap­tured by Tone, his delicate features, his narrow-lipped mouth, the irony I thought implicit in his remote smile that assured me, "I'm superior to all this playacting...," and above all by what I perceived as his nature, quixotic and spiritual.

I had been struck a great blow by the force of movie love. Later, in 1939, on spring vacation from a Montreal board­ing school, I saw Tone in a Group The­atre production of The (kntle People.

My father, a screenwriter at the time, knew the business manager of the Group, Walter Fried, whom he called Cousin Wally. Fried arranged for me to see the play. He smoked cigars, wore a dark fedora, and the top of his shirt was unbuttoned.

On the evening I attended the play, Cousin Wally told me through the box-office grille that he had arranged for the cast to meet for drinks in a small frowzy bar across the street from the theater. Would I like to join them there?

Alter the final curiain fell 1 walked over to the bar, uneasy yet exalted. But Tone didn't turn up, although the rest of the cast was there. I felt a bleak relief at his absence, at the same time disap­pointment without end.

I had bought a dress for the occasion. Hought is hardly the right word. In those clays you could return clothes to stores the next day with an excuse that the dress was too tight, too loose, too any­thing at all. Borrow would be more apt.

Before Act One, 1 walked down the aisle to my free seat, aware of how people were staring at me. Later, in the ladies' room, I saw in a mirror that I had for­gotten to remove the price tag hanging from the back of the dress. People must have noticed the large white cardboard rectangle, size and price printed on it in big black letters. I was unembarrassed by my emotions that evening; they were all-consuming, and I was barely aware of them. But the tag shamed me. I returned the dress the next morning.

A few days later 1 bought a book. Trivia, by an Anglophile writer, Logan Pearsall Smith, and along with a letter, sent it via Cousin Wally to Tone. As I think back now, it seems to me that Fried was highly amused by the entire incident.

I hardly recall my letter. It was prob­ably an effort to differentiate myself from his other admirers and to praise the book for qualities that would attest to my own sensibilities. Cousin Wally told me later that Kranchot had assembled the cast and read my letter aloud to them.

Yet he answered it. Joy leapt up in me when I saw the envelope. His reply was cordial, intimate, I judged. But I was faintly distressed by what I sensed was a distancing sardonic note. But what did I expect? Everything, I suppose.

I kept his reply in a file cabinet in the cellar of the brownstone where I now live, until a decade ago. One morning a local water main burst. A flood resulted, and it took many hours for firemen to

pump out the six feet of water. Tone's letter was ruined, along with other cor­respondence and some book contracts.

When I was 16 I lived with an elderly alcoholic woman, a friend of my step­mother's, who had sent me to California with her. One rainy afternoon in Holly­wood, where we lived. 1 drove to a local drugstore to get a prescription for her. .As 1 hastened back to where 1 had parked, on tiptoe to avoid the deeper puddles of water, a voice from a parked car inquired. "Where are your ballet slippers?"

It was Franchot Tone. My heart raced as I smiled in his direction, but I hurried to my car through the rain, which had gotten suddenly heavier.

A few years later, back in New York City, I went to see a movie of his. Five Craws to Cairo, I think it was titled, at the Paramount Theatre in the Broadway district. The sidewalk was crawling with adolescent girls, agitated, some crying, others laughing as they left their places in the line to dance a few steps on the street. In that era there were stage shows in some movie houses. The girls had all come to see and hear Frank Sinatra, a singer. The name meant nothing to me.

1 found a balcony seat near three sail­ors who laughed raucously as they jeered at the teenagers below us in the audience, who were keening and shrieking.

A skinny young man entered the stage as a curtain was parting to reveal the orchestra behind him. He sang, holding on to the microphone, des­perately, I thought, as though it would save him from drowning among his worshippers. What was it that drove them crazy? Franchot Tone was. after all, a serious actor....

The last time I saw Tone was in a small shop on Lexington Avenue in Manhat­tan. The optician who owned it was an old friend, and I had joined him for a brown-bag lunch. We were sitting at the rear of the narrow store, eating sand­wiches, when Tone, wearing a beret, opened the door and leaned in.

In that first moment of my recognition of him—though like me he had grown much older—1 lost my breath. He smiled at me, and it was such a lovely smile! All his old charm for me was in it. He asked Lou. my friend, when his eyeglasses would be ready. The optician replied, but I couldn't hear language. What 1 felt at that moment was beyond words. My healing returned in time to hear Ibne's thanks and good-bye to Lou.

Upon fust seeing him years earlier, I had been astonished by the emotions his screen presence had brought to life in me. I had loved him in a make-believe way—the way most emotion begins—for years.

That intensity of feeling prepared me. in some fashion, for love itself, its contra­rieties, its defeats, its beauty.

THERE WAS THE "INVOLUNTARY SHUDDER' IN MY BODY THAT WE READ ABOUT IN NOVELS BUT NEVER ACTUALLY GET TO FEEL

When she looks at the camera in that scene, I feel closer to her than I've ever felt to anyone in a film.